The Team
Prof. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi
I study late medieval society and culture through the prism of the body, health, knowledge, faith and religious belonging. My first book, Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2017), studied late medieval medical understanding of the soul and the emotions and examined the links and mutual influence between medical thought and practice and ideas about sin and penance. I then turned to study the writings and history of Juan of Aviñón whose fascinating story led me to examine late 14th century Christian healthcare in Castile. In recent years, my work has focused on cases of postpartum mental distress in the later Middle Ages. Looking at issues such as purity and time, mental instability, demonology and childbirth.
Working on these various health related topics, I became interested in the role of faith, trust, and hope within medical care. The MedPlaceboEffect project examines how these sensibilities, considered at times a challenge in modern medicine, were defined in late medieval healthcare.
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I am director of The Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies and co-editor of Mediterranean Historical Review
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Select publications:
“Records of Trusted Medicines: Don Meir Alguades’ Segulot Muvḥanyot in Context.” Early Science and Medicine 29:2 (2024): 170-192.
Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Guy Erez, "The womb as a wild mother beast." Postmedieval 15 (2024): 301–328.
"A Healthy Christian City: Christianizing Healthcare in Late Fourteenth Century Seville." Journal of Medieval History 48:5 (2022): 664- 685.
"Experiences: Feeling Unhealthy in Late Medieval Europe." in The Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages ed. Iona McCleery (London: Berg, 2021), pp. 131-153.
“Postpartum Mental Distress in Late Medieval Europe.” The Mediaeval Journal 9:1 (2019): 109-141.
Dr. Tamar Nadav
Tamar Nadav is a medievalist focusing on the transmission of medical knowledge and its interaction with cultural, religious, and political dynamics. In her doctoral dissertation, she explored the formation of a detailed theory of the psychosomatic nature of humans during the medical “renaissance” of the twelfth century. Focusing on six medical commentaries associated with the school of Salerno, she suggested to reconsider the role their authors played in shaping a new medieval language for the body-soul nexus, centred around the heart and its role in translating thoughts and desires into physical reactions. At the MedPlaceboEffect project, she deepens her examination of medieval conceptualizations of the psychophysiological mechanism of hope (spes), belief (fides), and trust (fiducia), by reconstructing the theoretical foundations of their Placebo effect as this was understood and conceptualized by late-medieval physicians and theologians.
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Dr. Nadav obtained a double doctoral degree in 2021 from the University of Paris Cité and the University of Haifa and has held since then postdoctoral positions in Ben Gurion University, the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas and Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies at Tel Aviv University. Since 2022, she has also been studying Hebrew translations of Latin medical works, particularly around the Italian Plagues.
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Her recent publications include:
The Science of Embodiment: Rethinking Medicine and the Divine in Twelfth Century Europe (under contract with Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine PSMEMM).
“The Mediating Spirit in Salernitan Reflections on the Body-Soul Nexus”, in Laetitia Loviconi et al. (eds.), Corps et âme: Relations et implications dans le fonctionnement corporel (Paris, Forthcoming)
"The Heart as a Sun, the Heart as a Roasted Chestnut: Images of the Human Heart and the Christian Discourse on the Soul in Twelfth-Century Physiology", in Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Liat Kuzma (eds.), Zmanim: Visual Representations of the Body and of Bodily Care (Tel Aviv, Forthcoming)
Shiri Salant-Birenboim
Shiri is a Ph.D student at the Zvi Ya'vetz School for Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. She holds a bachelor's degree in law and social sciences and a master's degree in general history. Her research interests revolve around late medieval European history, focusing on medieval medicine, social aspects of the medical professions, health preservation, and public health. Her Ph.D dissertation explores methods employed by late Medival Marseilles' authorities to keep a healthy environment and promote public health. In particular, the research focuses on methods and knowledge, shared by Jews and Christians alike, to keep a healthy body and habitat, in an inter-religious urban environment.
Omer Elmakais
Omer studies the physical and spiritual reformation and rehabilitation process of prostitutes-turned-nuns in 14th century Southern France, with a particular interest in the Repenties monastery in Avignon, a religious house for repentant prostitutes. She’s an M.A. student writing her Master’s thesis in the Department of General History at Tel Aviv University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in General History and Art History from Tel Aviv University.
Eliezer Grunzweig
Eliezer is a master's student in the Department of History (Middle Ages) at Tel Aviv University. His field of research focuses on reconstructing the medical experience of the pilgrims along the French road leading to Santiago de Compostela between the 11th and 14th centuries. The sources used in the research include formal, geographical and literary corpuses from that time. In his previous career, he worked as an industrial and management engineer.
Daniel Stern
Danny is a graduate student in the History Department at Tel Aviv University, focusing on the influence of sermons in driving social reform during the late Middle Ages. He has a background in founding and nurturing technology startups in the fields of command and control.
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Alma Eliaz
Alma Eliaz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Tel Aviv University. Her primary areas of interest are medieval Hebrew astrology and the occult sciences.
Her master's thesis examined the relationship between Hebrew geomancy and astrology as it appears in a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript. Her current research focuses on aspects of authority, skill, belief, and trust in the works of Jewish medieval astrologers and practitioners of the occult.
Didi Atsmon
Didi Atsmon is the project manager for MedPlaceboEffect. She holds a master’s degree in history from Tel Aviv University. Her thesis, Dark Matter: Aesthetics and Enslavement at the Court of Isabella d’Este, explored how enslaved African children were used as exotic possessions to display taste and assert power in 15th- and 16th-century Mantua.